May 29, 2015

As those of you who follow me on Twitter or are Facebook friends with me, I’ve been part of the local programme committee of the International Congress of Phonetic sciences 2015 in Glasgow, and my role was to draft the oral programme, with steadfast support from Glasgow phonetician Rachel Smith.

In the following weeks, I will give you an insight into the way the programme was put together and explain some of the constraints we faced, the tools we used, and the decisions we made.

As ICPhS draws ever closer, I will start to highlight interesting sessions and feature phonetics bloggers and tweeters.

Kicking off, the next post (to be posted in two hours) is a plea for help from fellow Social Media junkies. If you have any comments, or ideas for what you would like to see featured in future posts, please leave a comment or tweet me (@mariawolters).

ICPhS is the biggest gathering in phonetics. Every four years, phoneticians and speech scientists from all over the world (except Antarctica) meet for five days of phonetics, phonetics, and yet more phonetics.

The programme is usually packed. This year alone, we will have fifteen time slots for oral presentations, with up to 8 parallel sessions. Around 380 papers will be presented orally, the same number as posters.

This year, we have a new feature, organised by Bert Remijsen and Pavel Iosad – ten discussant sessions, where eminent phoneticians pick four particularly interesting papers and discuss them in a thematic session. For reasons I will explain in a later post, these sessions are organised in two blocks of five parallel sessions.

All of this is a surefire recipe for many, many frustrated phoneticians. One way of mitigating at least some of the frustration is social media.

I know from ICPhS 2011 in Hong Kong that many people are already prepared to tweet the sessions they attend, but I wonder what we could do if we were a bit more organised this time around.

Specifically, I am wondering whether people would be happy to commit in advance to reporting specific sessions on social media. This could be through live tweets, a blog post, a LinkedIn entry, a Facebook summary, a MySpace song … you get the idea.